Essays on becoming by Chris Barclay
Here’s a puzzle: how do you become something if you’ve never been something? For example, how do I become a leader if I’ve never been a leader? The conventional answer is to study how to be a leader and then gradually learn as you go along. I teach leadership at the executive level, so I […]
Continue ReadingWhen I saw the documentary, The Secret, I thought, “so all I have to do is wish for something and it will come true?” I’m certainly not one to discount the power of positive thinking, but I felt something was missing from this premise. If it’s a secret, how come so many people know about […]
Continue ReadingYou’re not who you think you are. This, according to movies like The Matrix, Fight Club, the Bourne Identity, The Truman Show, Lost Highway and many others. Not only are you somebody else, but you are actually living “in a world where nothing is as it seems”, to quote one of the most popular movie […]
Continue ReadingHaving spent my last 16 or so Christmases in Asia, I don’t feel its commercial impact the way I did in the U.S. I honestly don’t miss it. This year we bought a good-sized potted conifer and put it on a small rug in the den by the fireplace (the one we’ve yet to use). […]
Continue ReadingThere is a wonderful quote by G.B. Shaw that goes like this: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in adapting the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Being unreasonable can mean someone who doesn’t listen, someone who is difficult to deal with. Imagine a […]
Continue ReadingI took several classes on Buddhism in college and even went to study in Sri Lanka in 1986, where I attended the University of Peradinya, in the central highlands of Kandy, a fantastic place. As part of my field research, I wanted to know what it was like to be a monk so I became […]
Continue ReadingVictor Frankl in his masterwork, “Man’s Search for Meaning” talks about how in the midst of the Holocost, he realized that there was one thing that his Nazi captors could not take from him: his ability to choose how he felt. Frankl wrote about this choice as the last of the human freedoms as “the […]
Continue Reading